Background The term “social capital” has received near-exponential attention in recent decades. Although originally elaborated by Coleman (1990), the major association has been with the work of Robert Putnam (Putnam.1995). The concept has deeply engaged political scientists and others (Fukayama. 2001), but has not been without its critics (van Deth. 2001; Durlauf. 2000). For the supporters of the concept, social capital is structural (referring to networks of social relationship), cultural (referring to social norms and values), and even psychological (referring to properties such as trust and self-efficacy). The presence of a high degree of social capital is argued to be one of the strong underpinnings of democracy. As Fukayama (2001) puts this: Social capital is important to the efficient functioning of modern economies, and is the sine qua non of stable liberal democracy. It constitutes the cultural component of modern societies, which in other respects have been organized since the Enlightenment on the basis of formal institutions, the rule of law and rationality1. Social capital thus is argued to be the bedrock of functioning democracy, and the presence of varieties of civic and social associations is assumed to contribute to more active citizenship. In the West at least, and following Putnam, there is increasing concern about the declining participation of citizens in elections, together with concern that citizens are also less interested in participating in social and civic networks and associations. Here, there are assumptions of an interactive relationship between social capital and active citizenship. It also seems evident that social capital is what is implicit in the idea of civil society as associational life. Putnam distinguished two different forms of social capital; bridging social capital, which builds links between groups, and bonding social capital, which solidifies links between groups. Of course, as Durlauf (2000) points out, these are not necessarily separated in either time or place, and often operate concurrently. It is useful to see that there may be different processes operating as social capital, but it is also not useful to suggest that they cannot operate concurrently. Furthermore, again as Durlauf points out, there is a very serious problem with assumptions about causality: does social capital create active citizens, or is social capital created by active citizens. A recent Zimbabwean study showed a strong association between active citizenship and support for democracy (RAU. 2016), but this was correlational not causal. Additionally, there are problems with the assumed relationship of other concepts such as trust and reciprocity. These are assumed to be critical concomitants of social capital: obviously, it is impossible to conceive of social networks that are not based in trust and reciprocal treatment of the members of the association or network, but what are the contributions of trust and reciprocity. In an empirical analysis of social capital and its relationship to political participation, van Deth (2001), provides modest evidence for the concept. Initially distinguishing between two different forms of social capital – individual attributes found in networks and collective goods available to all citizens – he goes to draw four major conclusions from his empirical investigation:  Trust is not relevant for the explanation of political engagement. Very few studies show a positive relationship between trust and political engagement, and these show very modest effects; 1 Fukayama, F (2001), p.7. 5